London: Palaeontologists have discovered
what they claim are the largest dinosaur footprints ever to be
found in Europe -- half way up a Swiss mountain.
A team at the Natural History Museum in Basel found
the footprints at 3,300 metres on a mountain in the Ela Nature
Reserve, Switzerland's largest park, leading British newspaper
'The Daily Telegraph' reported.
According to the palaeontologists, the three-toed
animal, which probably measured between 15 and 20 feet long,
walked through what is now the Swiss Alps more than 210
million years ago.
The 15-inch-long prints belonged to a carnivore from
the Triassic period that would have been the biggest predator
on the planet at the time.
And, the footprints were originally made when the
region was a huge tropical coast before millions of years of
geological pressure folded the land into mountains, the team
members said.
Bureau Report
First Published: Wednesday, August 19, 2009, 12:33